The Changing Attractiveness of European Higher Education: Current Developments, Future Challenges, and Major Policy Implications

Abstract

The strength (and attractiveness) of higher education in Europe is a research topic which seems to be most usefully discussed with reference to other dimensions of higher education These include high-quality teaching; cutting-edge research; the future of the combination of the two academic missions in increasingly differentiated systems; adequate and more diversified (both public and private) funding under pervasive fiscal pressures in most European economies; more differentiated institutions and consequently a substantially more stratified academic profession. It is difficult to define either the strength or the attractiveness of European higher education as both are relative and elusive terms: to be strong and to be attractive means different things in different contexts (local, national, European), at different (micro-, meso-, and macro-) levels and for different constituencies (or stakeholders). On top of that, we are discussing multiple future social and economic developments and their possible, relatively uncoordinated, if not chaotic, impacts on higher education systems. The paper will focus on the different — and often conflicting — senses of the attractiveness of European systems and institutions to students, academics, the labor market, and the economy. Universities need to be attractive to increasingly differentiated student populations (and to cater for their increasingly different needs) but they also need to be attractive workplaces and provide attractive career opportunities for academics. In the face of ongoing restructuring of the public sector in general in many parts of Europe, universities also need to keep the respect for traditional academic values, and in the face of the competition with other parts of the world, they still need to be open to such values in their teaching and research. Their attractive curricula need to match transformations in the labor market and in the economy in general. Finally, to be attractive, European higher education needs to be distinctive from higher education in other parts of the globe.